Mr Pus

From the department of what is that smell. From Da Goddess

I don’t see that well, neither am I able to hear very well, in fact I am nearly deaf in one ear as a result of an infection that ran amok when I was in nursing school. But, some things are imprinted in your smell library that just never go away. In my library I have the odor of burned human flesh, decaying human flesh, bloated dead (you name the animal), lion breath, toxic crotches, other peoples toxic dumps, and a host of many unappealing body oozages. Ya, I know, not a word, but if it has oozed out of the body I have probably had to deal with it.

One particularly nasty toxic cloud I experienced in the small rural hospital I worked in in Alaska. This particular ER had six beds and absolutely NO ventilation system. The ER was over one hundred fifty feet from the main heating and cooling plant and was ventilated with one eight inch air duct that feed the main trauma room and the other three treatment rooms. The ventilation system was as effective as those idiotic kitchen vents that blow the smoke back into the room rather than outside.

I was caring for a five year old girl who had sprained her ankle. She was a bright and inquisitive little girl and had what turned out to be a broken ankle. She was in bed three in the trauma room, and an old smoking fart with an empyema or pyothorax was in bed one. That’s a lung or chest cavity full of pus folks.

The trauma room doors were closed and we were waiting for x-ray to come and get the girl. Unbeknownst to me, because Mr. Pus  wasn’t my patient, the surgeon had arrived and the other nurse (thank god not me) was setting up to put in a chest tube behind curtain number one.

The doctor asked me to go with her to examine the little girl as she wanted my help to hold her leg while she examined it. The doc had sprained her wrist and just needed someone with a little more strength to hold the leg. As we entered the trauma room our eyes started to tear. I held my breath as the doc ran to the childs bed, scooped her up in her arms (now miraculously healed) and ran from the room.

A glance at the floor revealed three liters of pus in three glass bottles, with a fourth bottle in the works. I can’t even describe the smell. The little girl was holding her nose as the doc ran by with her. That smell hung in the ER for days after to the topnotch ventilation system we had.

I was working in another ER when I was asked to go help get a man out of his RV which was pulled up to the ambulance doors. Apparently the man was a paraplegic and was driving across the country. When I approached the RV he was sitting quietly in the drivers seat in no distress. He opened the door as I approached and said he had a little bleeding problem and needed some help. I had already put on my gloves as you learn quickly little surprises await those who reach randomly under patients.

With help I lifted the patient into a hospital wheelchair. The wind had been blowing and I had been lucky enough to be up wind throughout this process. I glanced at the drivers seat and it was awash in a dark blackish liquid. I wheeled the patient to the trauma room and left a ribbon of black syrupy fluid down the hall. It was about the consistency of heated hot fudge, and about as gooey to clean up. Once I got him into the trauma room I received help talking off his pants before placing him in the bed. He wasn’t wearing an undergarment.

He said he was driving across the country and had started to bleed in Mississippi, this was Arizona.

And you just kept driving?

Yup.

It took only moments for the thick stench to reach my nostrils. It clawed at us as we cleansed the patient’s bottom. We discovered that the ooze was not coming from his anus, but from a hole about 4 inches from it. A continuous stream of not black gold continued to pour from the wound every time we repositioned the patient. The patient seemed oblivious to the odor and chatted as we cleansed him.

When we finished we left the trauma room only to find the entire ER staff holding their noses and trying to breath through shirts pulled up over their noses and mouths. It didn’t help. I went and rinsed my nostrils with water and changed cloths. It didn’t help. I had to walk by the waiting room to change cloths and noticed almost the entire lobby was standing outside escaping the stench. We even had several patients decide that their problem was not that bad if they had to wait in the ER to be treated.

We learned later that the substance was a combination of liquid shit and blood. A particularly nasty GI bleed.

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